Even though many friends returned to school last week, this week was our official start to our normal routines in our classrooms! We celebrated back to school with our Outback at the ECDC week! In Pre-K 1 we talked about schools and spent some time constructing schools of our own in blocks.
Pre-K 2 did some building, too!
We spent time exploring our classrooms and learning centers and played with our new friends.
We explored our home center with fabulous dress up options,
and we did quite a bit of reading!
We also began our morning messages this week. If you would like to know more about how morning messages enrich our classrooms in literacy and print awareness, you can read about it here. Below are a few of the morning messages we introduced this week!
Sometimes the morning messages consist of our thoughts about a topic or group discussion. Other times they are very interactive. Eventually children will respond to the morning messages independantly with their own words and pictures!
We read Chrysanthemum this week and discussed how to treat our classmates with kindness. We also talked a lot about names since we are getting to know eachother!
In Pre-K 1 we made a name/picture matching game!
Friends could match pictures to names and then make their own names out of tiles.
This center was a pretty big hit!
Pre-K 2 graphed the number of letters they had in their names.
While we were discussing names and letters, we did a lot of alphabet activities!
We even stamped our names into playdough!
And we added letters to the sand table!
In art we made name flowers. The sweetpeas loved getting to write and paint.
They did all their art independantly!
They were very proud of thier work when they were done!
We also read this favorite story:
Pre-K 2 discussed elements of the story as a group.
They also made their own kissing hand!
One of Pre-K 1's morning messages asked the class to trace and color their hands.
We assessed cutting and counting skills with a quick Chester the Racoon math sheet.
We were very impressed with Pre-K 1's scissor skills!
We also read this book:
It's a very sweet way to talk about how we make others feel. We can fill their bucket by showing kindness and using nice words, or you can empty someone's bucket by hurting their feelings or leaving them out. We made our own buckets to remind us that we want to fill our friends buckets up with kindness!
We're hanging up our buckets on the wall!
To wrap up the week we read Pete the Cat-Rocking in My School Shoes
We sure love Pete the Cat!
Since we do an awful lot of rocking in Pre-K 1, we decided to make a class book! We gave each sweetpea a paper to fil their name into this sentence:
Next we took pictures of everyone's shoes. Here's a few! I will glue the pictures onto the pages later to make our first class book!
We also graphed the color of our shoes in our graphing chart. Here it is in progress:
We had such a fun week in Pre-K 1 & 2 getting to each other. We have talked about big problems and little problems, discussed how to move in centers, learned how to pour our own water and accomplished a great many other things. The year is off to a wonderful start and we look forward to a great year in Pre-K!
